Mayor Pete Buttigieg criticized Christians for supporting President Donald Trump, blasting him for cutting food stamp benefits.
Buttigieg quoted Scripture at length to criticize Trump and his supporters during a rally in Seattle on Tuesday:
When Scripture says that you are to concern yourselves with the poor, and the White House says ‘Let’s take away food stamps.’ When Scripture says, ‘I was a stranger and you welcomed me’ and the White House says ‘send them back’ and ‘build a wall.’ When the Word says, ‘You will know me by my works’ and ‘suffer the little children unto me’ and they’re putting children in cages, you have a choice if you are a person of faith and it is not the person in the White House right now.
The number of people in the food stamp program has sunk to its lowest level in ten years, according to the Department of Agriculture. The Trump administration also proposed Tuesday closing food stamp loopholes by cracking down on who fits under “categorical eligibility.”
Buttigieg frequently campaigns on the idea that he is more pious than President Trump, offering voters a better choice to have a president reflecting religious values.
Since the early days of his presidential campaign, the South Bend mayor has shamed Christians in the Trump administration, accusing them of hypocrisy.
His awkward attempt to brand Trump-supporting Christians as “Pharisees” drew condemnation from prominent Jews, forcing him to stop.
Unlike his rivals, Buttigieg used some of his precious time in the NBC Democrat presidential debates to speak directly to voters about religion.
“The Republican Party likes to cloak itself in the language of religion,” he said. “But we should call out hypocrisy when we see it.”
He continued by accusing Republicans of saying it was “OK to suggest that God would smile on the division of families” and “that God would condone putting children in cages” declaring that the Republican party had “lost all claim to ever use religious language again.”
During his rally with Seattle supporters, Buttigieg repeated his slogan that “God does not belong to a political party” and making the moral case that people of faith should support Democrats.
“We know how to do two things at once,” he told supporters. “We can stand up for the idea that anybody in office or running for office ought to stand up equally for people of any religion and of no religion and everybody would be treated the same.”
Buttigieg and his husband Chasten were married at the Episcopal Cathedral of St. James and continue to attend services there.
To Christians questioning his marriage, Buttigieg defiantly challenges them for supporting Trump.
“If somebody wants to raise the question of which one of us has a more traditional attitude on marriage, we can have that fight,” he said in May.
When asked about Buttigieg’s marriage in an interview, Trump said that it was “absolutely fine.”
“I think it’s great. I think that’s something that perhaps some people will have a problem with. I have no problem with it whatsoever,” he said in a Fox News interview.
But Buttigieg dismissed Trump’s response.
“That’s nice. I’m more interested in policies that affect LGBTQ people,” he said when asked to respond to Trump’s comments in an interview with National Public Radio.
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